Bombs into wine?

Hezbollah is shelling Mount Carmel, where the prophet Elijah (the prophet Ilyas in the Qu'ran) walked. Mount Carmel is also where some of the very earliest human beings are found, and the one and only place in the world where our kind is known to have lived and interacted peacefully with another human species - the Neanderthals.

And then there's Qana (Cana.) 2,000 years ago, the town of Qana was the scene of a wedding, where the Gospel of John records Jesus turning water into wine. The steward famously declares, "Every man at first sets forth the good wine, and when men have drunk much, then the lesser. But you have kept the good wine until now."

Let us hope the good wine is yet to come. I can't, for the moment, shake the mental image of children choking on dust, and fire raining from the sky, which is happening throughout the lands where prophets walked. It is a far cry from wine at the moment.

Since so much of Israel and Lebanon are the places we read about in the Bible, who knows what treasures lie buried in the hills, wadis, and plains? The places that should be most precious to us - the very places where God has approached us and tried to make himself known to us - are the foothills of war, once again.

Who profits from war? Not people. People in every place have so much in common, and war acts as opacity to what would otherwise be so obvious. I am not so simplistic as to think that politicians necessarily profit from war: Churchill aside, many a politician has ruined his or her career in war, or by taking military action. The militaries themselves don't profit from war; although an army may become known as a robust fighting force from how they acquit themselves in war, the military pays dearly in lost men and women, and in the darkening of souls who have seen harrowing horrors they wish they had not seen.

Given the costs of war, why does it surface so often? Why does it always seem to come to this?